Hugh Masekela
Biography
1939-2018
Born in the township of Kwa-Guqa, Witbank, a coal mining settlement near Johannesburg, the young Hugh Ramapolo Masekela was inspired to play trumpet by the 1950 Kirk Douglas film Young Man With a Horn and immediately excelled on the instrument. Encouraged to perform by anti-apartheid activist Trevor Huddleston (through whose auspices the young Masekela received a gift of a brand new trumpet from none other than jazz superstar Louis Armstrong), by the late ’50s, Masekela was making his name playing with South African bebop combo the Jazz Epistles, with whom he would cut the country’s first jazz album. He would also play in the band for the hit musical King Kong, billed as an ‘all-African jazz opera’, featuring the country’s most renowned female singer, Miriam Makeba, who Masekela would later marry. In 1960, he would leave an increasingly acrimonious South Africa, first for London and then New York, where he enrolled in the Manhattan School of Music and immersed himself in the jazz scene, later settling in California. Hits like easy-paced 1968 instrumental chart topper ‘Grazing in the Grass’, produced by his long-term producer, partner and friend, Stewart Levine, an appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival and a guest slot on The Byrds’ ‘So You Want to Be a Rock‘n’Roll Star’ helped turn Masekela into a pop celebrity, but at the same time exposure to militant Black US politics and the wider counterculture radicalized him, and after more than a decade in exile he returned to Africa.
In 1973, Masekela spent time in Zaire, Liberia, Ghana, and Lagos, Nigeria, where he stayed for a month with the similarly politicised Fela Ransome-Kuti, who duly introduced him to the traditional West African music-based Ghanaian/Nigerian band OJAH, with whom he recorded and later toured in the US. A fellow trumpeter before he took up his signature sax, Fela Kuti’s influence on Masekela would remain pervasive (Masekela would have a hit with his 1984 version of the Fela classic, ‘Lady’). Together with Levine, Masekela would stage the Zaire ‘74 concerts that preceded the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ Kinshasa boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, and he would later settle in Botswana. Anti-apartheid protest songs like ‘Soweto Blues’ (1976) and ‘Bring Him Back Home (Nelson Mandela)’ (1987) would keep Masekela’s name front and centre in South Africa, even if his presence on Paul Simon’s 1987 Graceland tour was regarded as controversial in some circles. After the fall of apartheid, he would finally return to his homeland and become a mainstay of its musical landscape once again while continuing to record and tour the globe. In 2010 he received his country’s highest honour, the Order of Ikhamanga. He passed away in January 2018 at the age of 78, after a battle with cancer.
BIOGRAPHY
1939-2018
Born in the township of Kwa-Guqa, Witbank, a coal mining settlement near Johannesburg, the young Hugh Ramapolo Masekela was inspired to play trumpet by the 1950 Kirk Douglas film Young Man With a Horn and immediately excelled on the instrument. Encouraged to perform by anti-apartheid activist Trevor Huddleston (through whose auspices the young Masekela received a gift of a brand new trumpet from none other than jazz superstar Louis Armstrong), by the late ’50s, Masekela was making his name playing with South African bebop combo the Jazz Epistles, with whom he would cut the country’s first jazz album. He would also play in the band for the hit musical King Kong, billed as an ‘all-African jazz opera’, featuring the country’s most renowned female singer, Miriam Makeba, who Masekela would later marry. In 1960, he would leave an increasingly acrimonious South Africa, first for London and then New York, where he enrolled in the Manhattan School of Music and immersed himself in the jazz scene, later settling in California. Hits like easy-paced 1968 instrumental chart topper ‘Grazing in the Grass’, produced by his long-term producer, partner and friend, Stewart Levine, an appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival and a guest slot on The Byrds’ ‘So You Want to Be a Rock‘n’Roll Star’ helped turn Masekela into a pop celebrity, but at the same time exposure to militant Black US politics and the wider counterculture radicalized him, and after more than a decade in exile he returned to Africa.
In 1973, Masekela spent time in Zaire, Liberia, Ghana, and Lagos, Nigeria, where he stayed for a month with the similarly politicised Fela Ransome-Kuti, who duly introduced him to the traditional West African music-based Ghanaian/Nigerian band OJAH, with whom he recorded and later toured in the US. A fellow trumpeter before he took up his signature sax, Fela Kuti’s influence on Masekela would remain pervasive (Masekela would have a hit with his 1984 version of the Fela classic, ‘Lady’). Together with Levine, Masekela would stage the Zaire ‘74 concerts that preceded the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ Kinshasa boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, and he would later settle in Botswana. Anti-apartheid protest songs like ‘Soweto Blues’ (1976) and ‘Bring Him Back Home (Nelson Mandela)’ (1987) would keep Masekela’s name front and centre in South Africa, even if his presence on Paul Simon’s 1987 Graceland tour was regarded as controversial in some circles. After the fall of apartheid, he would finally return to his homeland and become a mainstay of its musical landscape once again while continuing to record and tour the globe. In 2010 he received his country’s highest honour, the Order of Ikhamanga. He passed away in January 2018 at the age of 78, after a battle with cancer.
RELEASES
